Weeks after his parents disappear on a hike, engineer Adam Carson, 27, searches for answers. Then he discovers a secret web site and learns his mom and dad are time travelers stuck in the past. Armed with the information he needs to find them, Adam convinces his younger siblings to join him on a rescue mission to the 1880s.

While Greg, the adventurous middle brother, follows leads in the Wild West, Adam, journalist Natalie, and high school seniors Cody and Caitlin do the same in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Like the residents of the bustling steel community, all are unaware of a flood that will destroy the city on May 31, 1889.

In RIVER RISING, the first novel in the Carson Chronicles series, five young adults find love, danger, and adventure as they experience America in the age of bustle dresses, gunslingers, and robber barons.

2 out of 5 stars

Huge thank you to John A. Heldt for sending me an e-copy of this book!

River Rising follows a family of five siblings who try and find their lost parents after figuring out they were lost while traveling through time. Adam, Greg, Natalie, Cody, and Caitlin travel to 1889 by following the directions laid out by their father. Their trip is full of love, loss, and some gunslinging.

This book took me forever to read. It accounts to the fact that I have much more reading homework this semester than I did last, and that it was 661 pages. I feel like this was unnecessarily long, and found that my interest wasn’t hooked unless I had been reading for at least twenty pages at a time. Being the college student I am, I don’t have huge chunks of time to just sit and read for fun anymore, so I rarely read more than 10 pages in one sitting.

Just to put this into perspective, I was reading this book for 24 days. It usually takes me less than a week to finish a book, so this was exponentially more than normal. Again it was probably just because of my intense class-load, but damn.

I liked the idea of this book because time travel is so cool to me. I love that all of Heldt’s books follow a time travel theme because it ties everything together. I love me some historical fiction so it’s also fun to dive into the past and read about a different time period. This wasn’t my favorite time period to read about, but it was still interesting.

I always have trouble with multiple *more than 2* perspectives, and this had chapters from all the siblings and the parents. Seven points of view was a lot to concentrate on especially when you have to read in short bursts.

I feel like I didn’t really get to know all the characters too well because there were so many to think about. I did really enjoy the twins because they seemed pretty cool. I liked Caitlin because she was the only one without a love interest, and she figured out what to do at the end of the book.

I was waiting for the parents to meet up with the kids the whole time super randomly and be like “hey what are you guys doing here,” but sadly that didn’t happen. I would recommend this to people who enjoy time travel books because there is a heavy emphasis on that throughout! I think this would also be good for younger teen/middle grade readers!